Re: Glottal stops (bis) (was RE: Missing African Latin letters (bis))

[Peter Kirk]

On 06/12/2003 20:28, Mark E. Shoulson wrote:

...

Take into consideration the innovation: a short glottal has been 
added because people wanted to case it like other letters. They might 
have made another typographic choice: they might have innovated a 
wide capital to distinguish it from the "lowercase tall" letter. But 
they didn't. 


Height is a (the?) recognized distinction between upper and lower 
case.  Width isn't.  So a "wide capital" wouldn't be the most 
intuitive choice.
But there is a precedent for this choice. When the Latin h was borrowed 
into Cyrillic (U+04BB, borrowed c. 1940 for languages which were forced 
to change from Latin to Cyrillic orthography at short notice), the lower 
case glyph was borrowed unchanged complete with ascender. But the upper 
case shape H was already in use for the sound n (U+041D), and so a new 
upper case glyph had to be invented. The shape chosen, U+04BA, was 
essentially a wide variant of h with upper case serifs (conveniently 
also an inverted U+0427).

--
Peter Kirk
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